In March 1923, George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. By then he had climbed the mountain twice. He had watched seven porters die in an avalanche the previous year. Stoically, he uttered three words which illustrates man’s confrontation with nature: “Because it’s there.” Mallory believed a mountain was not an opponent to be beaten but a place for a person to test themselves. They were true mountaineers in spirit, in soul, in action: they did not climb using snowmobiles, expensive sophisticated modern gear or a helicopter; just courage and the excitement of attaining the home of the gods. Now, the controversy is no longer about the crowded Base Camp and the garbage. It is something more alarming. The rampant commercialisation of Mount Everest has led to a tech-obsessed, Instagram-led, high-spending ecosystem, which neither respects the sanctity of the adventure nor understand its dangers. But then, there are the brave who venture into death and conquer what the mountain wills.
In May this year, Arun Kumar Tiwari, a mountaineering enthusiast from Hyderabad, died near the Hillary Step after summiting Everest. But he did conquer it. His family decided not to retrieve the body because of the extraordinary danger and cost involved. Tiwari remains frozen in time like so many before him.
The Multi Crore Desecrations
A century after Mallory, at 3 am on May 20, 2026, a line of headlamps could be seen moving up Everest from the south. By the end of the day, a record 274 people had reached the summit via Nepal. Locals call climbers like them “Everest tourists”. Many had paid more than $45,000 each, relied on bottled oxygen, clipped onto fixed ropes secured by Nepali workers and carried satellite phones—just in case they ran into a Yeti, an impossibility. For them, Everest is increasingly a trip to tick off, like boating on Dal Lake.
Dr Priya Selvaraj, who summited Everest this season, speaks of the peril faced by genuine mountaineers. On the way up, she encountered a serac—an unstable block or column of glacial ice formed by intersecting crevasses—which she describes as “an overhanging piece of ice, threatening to drop.” The danger delayed her Everest season by two to three weeks. The ice was not kind to the Sherpas securing the route either. “Many of the Sherpas were critically injured, and one of them lost his life,” she says. For Selvaraj, this season also set a record for the sheer concentration of thrill-seeking tourists, not merely the number of permits issued. A widely published photograph of nearly 200 climbers strung along the route captures the phenomenon: “almost like a whole snake,” she says. “So many people climbing simultaneously is dangerous. They have to be supported, but you really can’t support another person unless you’re alright yourself.”
Callous and Crass
The profile of Mount Everest’s workforce has changed as much as its clientele. Between 2000 and 2025, 15,781 people went above Nepal’s Base Camp: 6,787 paying clients and 8,994 hired support climbers. In 2025 alone, 437 Nepalis and 272 foreigners reached the summit. Nepali workers now dominate Everest’s commercial climbing economy—but they also bear a disproportionate share of its risks. Of the 339 deaths recorded on the mountain by 2025, 132 were hired workers, primarily Sherpas. All three fatalities at the start of this season were Nepali mountain workers. On April 18, 2014, an ice avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall killed 16 Nepali workers, then the deadliest single day in Everest’s history. A year later, on April 25, 2015, an earthquake triggered an avalanche at Base Camp, killing about 22 people. The risks are built into the job. “Sherpas go through the Khumbu Icefall many times carrying loads, fixing ropes, and preparing the route before clients climb,” says Pemba Sherpa, whose father died on a Makalu winter expedition this year.
“Sherpa” is an ethnic identity, but on the Everest it has also become a job title loosely applied to high-altitude workers from other communities, including Rai and Tamang climbers. Many are young and, according to veteran guides, less experienced than the Sherpas of earlier decades. Sudhigya, a climber caught this season in a two-hour bottleneck near the Hillary Step in winds exceeding 80 km an hour, argues that Everest’s economics encourages clients to lean on that workforce beyond what is fair. “The most dangerous assumption in modern commercial climbing is that money guarantees safety,” he says. “‘The Sherpa will carry me, the Sherpa will fix my mistakes.’” He objects to what he sees as an entitled attitude: “Sherpas are human beings with beating hearts, families, and children waiting for them back in the valley. They are not superhuman pack animals hired to drag dead weight up and down an 8,000-meter wall.”
A client who refuses to turn around because “their ego demands a summit photo,” he says, is gambling with someone else’s life as well as their own. “A true mountaineer does not outsource their survival.”
The Amateur’s Ambition
The typical Everest client today is unlikely to be a lifelong alpinist. More often, they are middle-aged, affluent, and successful—executives, doctors, entrepreneurs, military officers, and influencers. This spring’s 495 permit holders came from 56 countries, led by China, the US, and India. A 2020 PLOS ONE study found that 69.6 per cent of Everest permit holders between 2015 and 2019 had never climbed a Nepalese peak before. Why Everest? For some, it is the final step in the Seven Summits; others seek charity credentials, national recognition, career opportunities or simply the image of the New Age Adventurer. In parts of India, a summit can bring a government promotion—police constables Dinesh and Tarakeshwari Rathod even faked summit photographs in 2016 and were subsequently banned by Nepal for 10 years.
Mountaineer and filmmaker Shuvam “Ronnie” Chatterjee calls these climbers “Everesters”—people chasing the summit rather than the craft. “Every mountaineer is an Everester, but not every Everester is a mountaineer,” he says, recalling clients shouting down the rope: “Bro, come, change my anchor.” The defining image came on May 22, 2019, when Nirmal “Nims” Purja photographed a long queue on the summit ridge; several climbers died that season after prolonged exposure in the death zone. Saanika Shah, who summited this season, found the ridge too narrow to pass: “No one wants to climb in this crowd. Still everyone goes.” Standing in the cold, she wondered: “Should I turn back?” But there is no Uber on Everest. The summit is climbable only during a brief April-May weather window; this season, there were just three or four usable days.
The Fat Cat Ecosystem
Speed has become the new climbing philosophy. In May 2025, four British former soldiers, including Royal Marines veteran and UK minister Alistair Carns, reached the summit less than a week after leaving London. Their operator, Lukas Furtenbach, had them sleep in hypoxic tents in England and inhale xenon gas beforehand, though medical experts warned that evidence for its benefits was limited and safety risks remained. The expedition reflects where commercial Everest is heading: less time on the mountain, more technology, and a summit squeezed between work commitments. Nepal raised the foreign-climber royalty on the standard route from $11,000 to $15,000 in September 2025. Full expeditions can cost $45,000 with Nepali operators, around $76,000 through international operators, and $150,000-$300,000 or more for ultra-luxury packages.
Ronnie, calls this the “arithmetic of Everest”: pay `30 lakh and you get the basics; pay twice that and you get more oxygen, Sherpas, and support—but not experience or mountain knowledge. He recalls climbers unable to change a carabiner or reset an anchor without Sherpa help. “Right now, Everest is not a mountain anymore; it’s more of a trophy,” he says. The crowding is intensified by restrictions on the Chinese side, pushing more climbers onto Nepal’s narrow fixed-rope route. Shayeet Sharma, a Nepali performance coach who worked with several expeditions, says the 2025 weather window was just three days, from May 20 to 23, after doctors and rope-fixing teams reopened the Khumbu Icefall. Waiting, he says, becomes “an extreme survival mode”.
God and Glory
In Mountains of the Mind (2003), British writer Robert Macfarlane argues that humanity’s love of mountains is a recent invention. Three centuries ago, risking your life to climb one would have seemed madness. But he also notes the darker impulse: “Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.” That tension runs through Everest’s history. Early climbers accepted that they might not return and valued how the mountain was climbed as much as reaching its summit. Jon Krakauer, writing about the 1996 disaster in Into Thin Air, observed: “Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there.” He also called Everest “a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.”
Today, the sacred and commercial coexist on Everest. Every expedition begins with a puja: a lama chants, juniper smoke rises, prayer flags are strung and climbing equipment are blessed. Many clients participate, photograph it and post it. The tradition was respected by the first successful climbers: on May 29, 1953, Tenzing Norgay left sweets and biscuits in the summit snow for the gods, while Edmund Hillary placed a crucifix beside them. On the descent, however, Hillary famously told George Lowe: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.”
Everest also carries newer myths. One is that money buys protection: bottled oxygen makes the death zone survivable and helicopters can always rescue those in trouble. In reality, helicopters mainly operate at lower camps. Above the South Col, a climber in distress still depends on other climbers. Even Didier Delsalle’s 2005 helicopter landing on the summit was a record, not a rescue service.
Death on the Slopes
At Base Camp, the main medical facility is Everest ER, a tent clinic run by the Himalayan Rescue Association. Founded in 2003 by emergency physician Dr. Luanne Freer, it treats altitude sickness, frostbite, injuries and infections, and provides oxygen, portable hyperbaric bags and helicopter evacuations. The HRA has also operated an aid post at Pheriche since 1973. Communications are extensive: mobile networks, satellite internet, Wi-Fi, radios and satellite phones keep climbers connected, while rescue times depend largely on altitude and weather. Helicopters can reach Base Camp and Camp II, with longline rescues reported as high as about 7,800 metres. Above that, rescuers must carry or drag casualties down. In May 2023, Gelje Sherpa and Nima Tashi spent hours rescuing Malaysian climber Ravichandran Tharumalingam from above 8,000 metres. The death zone, above 8,000 metres, has only about one-third the oxygen found at sea level, and humans can generally survive there for only 16-20 hours. A cardiac arrest at that altitude is effectively impossible to treat. Of the 339 deaths recorded on Everest through 2025, more than 200 bodies are believed to remain on the mountain, buried in snow, trapped in crevasses or visible along the routes. Rob Hall, who died during the 1996 storm, made his final satellite-phone call to his pregnant wife, Jan Arnold: “Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” His body remains on Everest.
As glaciers thin, bodies are beginning to emerge from the Khumbu Icefall and around Camp I. On Everest’s north side, the most famous is “Green Boots,” long believed to be the body of Tsewang Paljor of an Indo-Tibetan Border Police expedition, though more recent Indian accounts suggest it may be Lance Naik Dorje Morup from the same expedition.
Violating the Pristine
The ecological cost to Everest is harder to see than the queues. The ICIMOD 2026 Glacier Outlook found that ice loss across the Hindu Kush Himalayas has doubled since 2000. A 2026 study led by Khimlal Gautam estimated that fuel use and human waste at Base Camp in one season released heat energy equivalent to melting about 2,492 tonnes of ice. Microplastics have been found as high as 8,440 metres, while PFAS “forever chemicals” have entered Khumbu meltwater. A 2023 study found freeze-dried microbes from human breath, coughs and sneezes preserved in soil at the South Col. Below, Sagarmatha National Park remains home to snow leopards, Himalayan tahr, musk deer, red pandas and the danphe. “We should move from ‘climb first and clean later’ to ‘pay for your environmental footprint before you climb,’” says Dr Soma Mishra, an environmental studies professor at MIT-World Peace University. Everest also preserves its dead. Bengali climber Goutam Ghosh died in 2016 and remained frozen at about 8,400 metres for more than a year before Sherpas recovered his body in 2017. Above 8,000 metres, the silence is almost absolute: no birds, little vegetation, only climbers and blowing snow. A tourist following a fixed rope might suddenly see an old leather helmet protruding from the ice—the mountain itself providing its own ghost.
Is there still a spiritual quest in all this? For some, clearly yes. Jamling Tenzing Norgay described his 1996 ascent as a pilgrimage in his father’s footsteps, while many Sherpa climbers still ask Goddess Miyolangsangma for permission before an expedition. But the logic filling Everest each May is increasingly commercial: permits, packages, sponsorships and social-media posts. Mallory climbed because the mountain was there; many now climb because they want to be seen on it. As Macfarlane argues, a mountain is a collaboration between rock and human imagination. The question is whether Everest is still imagined as sacred and dangerous, or merely as a backdrop for a summit photograph.
Mallory wrote in 1918: “Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves.” Sudhigya, recalling his own climb, says, “Anger will only weaken you mentally, and I cannot be low mentally at that point,” adding that looking beyond the climbers ahead “transformed raw frustration into deep gratitude.” Arjun Vajpai, who has climbed eight of the world’s 14 peaks above 8,000 metres, rejects the notion that Everest itself has become easier to climb. “The mountain is still standing there. It does not become shorter, it does not become taller. Nothing has changed.” What has changed, he says, is access—better equipment and faster rescue—while temperatures can still fall to minus 60 or minus 70°C. “When it comes to nature, the mountain is always going to win,” he says. “It is not that the mountain hasn’t become easy, but it has become more accessible.”
And then there is the oldest mystery. On June 8, 1924, Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine were seen climbing the northeast ridge before disappearing into cloud. Mallory’s body was found in 1999; Irvine’s remains missing. In 2024, National Geographic found a boot and foot bearing Irvine’s name, but not the Kodak camera he carried. Had the camera survived, its film might have answered whether they reached the summit. The world might finally have known whether Everest was conquered by men without sat phones, acclimatisation tents, hired Sherpas, and bottomless bank accounts.